What You Need to Use This Book

To effectively complete the examples in this book, you should have access to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment or site collection in an administrative role. If you do not have administrative rights to your server, you may have to gain the assistance of your server administrator for some exercises in this book.

For the chapter covering the Business Data Catalog, you will require access to a properly defined business application in the BDC. Although the definition and configuration of a business application in the BDC is not covered in this book, the exercises depend on the existence of an application. For the exercises in this book, the Adventure Works sample database is used based on the SDK sample available at the following location:

 www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D94E307-67D9-41AC-B2D6- 0074D6286FA9&displaylang=en

You should also have a client computer running either Windows XP or Windows Vista along with Microsoft Office 2007 Professional or Enterprise. While many exercises can be completed with earlier versions of Office, certain exercises related to workflow, Forms Services and Excel Services are dependent on features only available in the Enterprise versions of Office 2007.